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With the world on the cusp of achieving a population of seven billion people, issues of demography are at the centre of discussions.

One particular report from Russia caught my attention. Russia's population is shrinking and will drop by a third by 2050: from 142 million people to 100 million.

It was Yuri Krupnov, Chairman of the Monitoring Council of the Russian Institute for demography, migration and regional development who revealed these figures.

In his piece published on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Russian, making some allowances for unforeseen circumstances, he spoke both about the causes and the consequences of that grim situation:

"One of the key factors is a combination of a 'European birth rate' (on average 1.5 children per woman) with an "African death rate", especially among the men of working age - with the male average life expectancy of just 63 according to the latest official data.

"Russia is the biggest country in the world by landmass, and the decline of its population will mean that large parts of the country risk being abandoned."

But the point which I would like to discuss is the mindset of a nation which faces such a rapid decrease in population.

What happens to the demography of Russia will be unsettling in terms of the national spirit.

Being the biggest country in the world by territory Russia has in parallel developed a sense of being a great nation too. And historically rightly so.

Look at its conquests, the wars it has won, its history of invention and discovery, its great literature, art - all of these achievements would justify such a feeling of pride.

However most of these accomplishments are increasingly confined to the past.

I follow the intellectual life of present-day Russia and see that this feeling of greatness is currently hanging in the balance between a glorious past and a mediocre reality of the present.

I have recently reviewed a compilation of modern Russian literary pieces and was amazed to discover that the common denominator in the theme for all the pieces in the book is the dysfunction between expectation and the reality.

This ubiquitous disfunctionality peppers literature with frustration; and this frustration translates into a telling mood on the national level.

Insecurities - as it's well known - are the fertile ground for aggression. I've seen it in behaviour of juvenile Taliban members; Russian literature tells the same story about the adolescent Bolshevism.

Xenophobia also has the same roots. Since this year has not yet ended, according to Sova, the centre for information and analysis, which monitors cases of xenophobia in Russia, in 2010 there were 436 registered cases of racial violence, including murder.

So every single day of the year someone is killed or severely beaten up in Russia just because he is from somewhere else.

In my novel Mbobo which tells the story of a mixed race boy born in Moscow in 1980 in the year of the Moscow Olympics, his two step-fathers discuss this issue:

'Good literature is literature you can't make a film out of'. Thus spoke drunk Gleb at Belarus Radial station, to which his conversant Nazar replied:

'The Russian people had one chance - to overcome themselves in the Soviet Ubermensch, but you Russians fucked it up!'

I trudged along behind them in silence.

'Myths, I tell you, are the genotype of culture, while humans are the phenotype!' continued Gleb cleverly, tongue-twisted and swaying.

Nazar followed his thought through: 'You laughed at Brezhnev and by the way he was the crown of Russian-ness, it was he who expressed with his tangling tongue the Marxist-Nietzschean idea of the new communality of people, the Soviet Nation, grown on Russian soil... and what happened? You laughed him down, pissed and shat on him.'

I listened to them both in silence.

'You know, we are Slavs...' Gleb was off on his ancient Slavonic high horse. 'And now there's no communality whatsoever, now this plague of Central Asian, Caucasian, Chinese locusts like myself will simply swallow the Russian nation, chewing it and digesting it without so much as stopping to ask its name... Give it 50 years, or 100...'

I walked behind them dully through the station, and when they both for some reason asked me in unison: 'How about you, are you Russian?'

I answered bitterly: 'I'm a black Russian...'

Mr Krupnov says that Russia needs a demographic revolution to turn the unwanted tide of change and the key according to him is to encourage a higher birth rate in Russia.

But Mbobo's alternative is different - to redefine what it means to be a Russian.

Examples set bu America, India, Brazil and many other nations which are based on citizenship rather than ethnicity might help to find the answer to the challenges which Russians face.

Two recent events: the death of Apple's founder Steve Jobs and the worldwide black-out of Blackberry smartphones drew everyone's attention to the fast-changing relationship between mankind and technology.

Taking part in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World Service interactive programme World Have Your Say on a completely different matter, I was drawn into an impromptu debate on this issue.

As I came out of that programme, I thought it would be good to think methodically about that relationship.

So first of all, what people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have done was akin to what Ford accomplished before them in the auto-industry - namely personalising computing and communications technology.

Before them Gates and Jobs, technology predominantly belonged to big groups of people, but not individuals. Computers, communication systems were run by collectives.

The Gates-Jobs revolution gave the technology to individuals, making them wholly responsible for running it and allowing them to truly own it on a personal level.

Paradoxically enough this holistic process played a big role in fragmentation of societies: self-equipped and self-sufficient individuals became the corner-stone of this continued trend.

The Internet has reorganised - or has attempted to reorganise - that fragmented world into a new virtual community: a virtual society.

There was a parallel process of information revolution unfolding at the same time, as the amount of available information doubled, tripled, and quadrupled over increasingly shorter periods of time.

Have we as human beings changed under all of these and many other pressures of modernity over the last 40-50 years?

Most definitely.

Let's say if a hundred years ago being 'a man of principles' was considered a virtue, nowadays adaptability and flexibility earns you more brownie points.

Reaction and wit are appreciated more than profoundness and wisdom. An autobiography of a comedian would certainly outsell any philosophical treatise.

Our attention span is ever decreasing, contemplation undoubtedly lost to multi-tasking.

So in short, the human race is changing at an ever increasing pace, egged on and transformed by its romance relationship with technology.

But yet there are plenty of things in our old arsenals which don't easily lose their value.

Take for example sayings and proverbs.

'Don't put all your eggs in one basket' - applies spot on when it comes to the recent Blackberry Messenger blackout and to our general dependency on new technology.

The common wisdom of 'Everything comes with a price-tag' or 'a double-sided coin' could help us manage our expectations and see things in their rightful context.

As for the debate itself: whether we are becoming too dependant on the technology, I suspect it's as old as the world itself.

I could imagine a lady in the Stone Age looking at the stone-knife invented by her partner and thinking: 'It's great to cut my hair with, but the kids could cut their fingers on it too...'

The same is with the ethics of technology. Technology is not either good or bad; it's ethically neutral. It's the people who use it in a particular way that makes it good or bad.

Here's an anecdote, which aptly makes the same point:

A computer server on which everyone in the office depended suddenly went down.
They tried everything but it still wouldn't work. Finally they decided to call in a high-powered computer consultant.

He arrived, looked at the computer, took out a small hammer and tapped it on the side. Instantly the computer leapt back to life.

Two days later the office manager received a bill from the consultant for $1,000.
Immediately he called the consultant and exclaimed, "One thousand dollars for fixing that computer?! You were only here five minutes! I want the bill itemized!"

The next day the new bill arrived. It read:

'Tapping computer with hammer: $1
Knowing where to tap: $999'

So with all due respect to the modern technology it's the human-being who ought to be watched out for the most.

I was amazed at how low the Nobel Prize for literature was in the news agenda last week. In case you didn't know, the award was given to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

News bulletins around the world hardly mentioned it even though the it wasn't a particularly busy day for breaking global news.

Does this reflect the lack of interest in literature and - in particular - in poetry.

Tomas Transtromer is neither a dissident, nor he is fighting for human rights. He is just a great poet.

Clear and succinct, sad and melancholic like a great poet should be.

So it seems that when the Nobel Prize is awarded for purely literary merit, there's no news story.

The Nobel Prize for literature is without doubt is the biggest literary accolade in the world. The anticipation of it can drive authors to distraction.

I've heard that one famous English writer - who has more than enough literary awards already - secludes himself at home and waits for a telephone call from Stockholm every October.

One of the most acclaimed Soviet writers once rang me asking what he could do to get a Nobel Prize: as if I was responsible for awarding it.

Some Russian writers even publish their would-be Nobel Prize lectures as a literary manifesto.

The Nobel prize for literature has been always a matter of controversy.

The award's critics are quick to name those literary giants such as Tolstoy and Joyce, Kafka and Borges, Nabokov and Muzil who have not received the award.

But more tellingly, around a third of the authors awarded the prize have disappeared from the literary annals almost without a trace.

: have you read - or even heard of - the writing of some of the winners even from the last 15-20 years?

Politics has apparently played a role in a number of Swedish Academy decisions.

At the peak of the controversial decisions around ten years ago, one famous French literary figure sarcastically exclaimed: "It will be no wonder if next year the prize will be given to some obscure Uzbek writer or poet because of the dictatorship there".

So beyond a national literary pride, I could see the point he was making.

There were indeed moments when candidates appear in the news before the announcement, extolling his or her causes, only weeks later do those causes go off the radar once the prize has been given.

Critics say that prize-giving bookmakers have developed a whole industry of betting on candidates (though even the list of the candidates is never released).

Thus this year a great deal of hype has been created around the name of Bob Dylan whose chances were put as high as 5:1 and according to the bookmakers themselves nearly a third of people placing bets on the outcome of the literature prize chose him.

It was this story that was the news highlight of the whole process, rather than the announcement of the actual winner.

Once upon a time winning the Nobel prize for literature was a life-changing event.

I read the memoirs of the wife of the great Russian writer Ivan Bunin. In 1933, she sent him from France, where they lived the life of emigres, to Stockholm to receive the award.

She writes that upon his departure Bunin's trousers were so worn out, that one could see his body as an x-ray.

When he returned he was able not just to pay back all the debts he had acquired over the years of migrant's hardship, but also to buy a villa and live the rest of his life in a decent manner.

In monetary terms the change is not so drastic now - the winner of The X Factor and other talent shows receive more financial gain.

But as I said in the beginning it's the foremost literary accolade.

And in a way I do sympathize to the Swedish Academy in their ambivalent perennial dilemma... On the one hand you want everyone to talk about the new literary 'immortals', so by this token you tend to choose someone who makes a splash in the 'puddle' of world news.

But on the other hand there's an ocean of literature with profound layers and layers where human eye, mind or soul - let alone news - rarely reaches and silence is twinned with it...

As the winner of this year Tomas Transtromer wrote:

A blue light
radiates from my clothing.
Midwinter.
Clattering tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a silent world
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled across the border.

I'm aware that my words will be out of sync and out of tune with that loud chorus of voices that is damning .

The internal inquiry is still going on, but the fans have already made up their mind: Tevez is the sole culprit.

Indeed all arguments seemingly support their view: Tevez is if not the highest paid, then at least one of the highest paid football players in the whole world.

The coach - Roberto Mancini had every right to ask him to play as a substitute at any time of the game and Tevez should have obeyed Mancini's decision.

It's a case of rebellion, unheard of in top league football and the rage of Man City supporters is quite understandable. Some of them spent thousands of pounds to see that match in Italy and had every right to expect commitment from all Man City players, including Tevez...

However, however, however...

I played football throughout my teenage years and even had hopes to play better than Pele.

Alas, it's the same old story of hopes turning - or rather burning up - into regret.

But I dare to think that I know something about the psychology of footballers - especially those with big egos.

I must say that I'm not one of Tevez's fans, quite the opposite. When I've seen him playing next to Messi for Argentina he seemed to me quite rough and, in some ways, one-dimensional.

So there's no personal bias on my part. But I can easily recognise his desire to play, his enormous determination, and his qualities as a fighter.

Though as a forward he is not 'my cup of tea', he must be well worth what he earns.

But let's get back to the incident itself, let's even assume that everything had happened as Mancini told us: Man City is losing 0-2, there are another 20 minutes of the game to go and he asks Tevez to warm up; and Tevez refuses to warm up and to play.

There's an old Uzbek joke.

Once, the character Mullah Nasreddin from Uzbek folklore was being teased by both of his two wives.

One of the wives asked Nasreddin in front of the other: "Tell us, whom do you love more, me or her?"

Nasreddin tried hard to look even-handed: "I love both of you equally!"

But the naughty wives went on and the older one said: "Imagine that all three of us are swimming in the river and if both of us start to drown. Who would you save?"

"I'd save both of you."

"But that would be impossible, the stream will be fast and we are heavy... You can only save one of us..."

Nasreddin looked simple-heartedly at the older one and said: "You can swim a bit, can't you?"

Thinking those two wives with the same husband, and then turning my thoughts to Tevez...

Manchester City bought not one but half a dozen world-class strikers: Dzeko, Aguero, Balotelli, Adebayor and Santa-Cruz.

For the 'top player' to be not a 'one and only' but a 'one of' is already an unbearable burden.

When on top of that, that person is treated as the 'second- third- or the fourth-best' choice and they also have unresolved family issues with your kids growing up in the opposite corner of the world - you have an explosive mixture, which waits for a release.

If one looks carefully, there's a moment of craftiness in Mancini's behaviour too.

If you can't win the lost game without Tevez and appeal to him as to the last resort, it means that he's better than others. Keeping him sidelined on the bench repeatedly is not fair.

But if he is not as good as he was (as Mancini says), what's the point of bringing him on instead of other, better (according to Mancini) strikers?

So as formal logic states: either-or.

Tevez must have felt something along these lines, when he proverbially exploded.

There's a bigger theme that emerges in this incident: a long lasting and strengthening tendency to treat the human body as a commodity.

Having been long established in the form of prostitution, it's becoming an integral part of modern day sport too.

For the top performing machines like Manchester City Tevez or Adebayor, Santa-Cruz or Balotelli are just spare parts, rather than human beings.

Like parts of high-performance cars they are well-looked after, polished and lubricated, but any unnecessary click - and they are immediately replaced to be thrown away.

Anelka could be bought instead of Shevchenko, Chamakh instead of Adebayor, Aguero instead of Tevez.

The human soul beneath the sporty body could always rebel at some point.

Tevez's case is partly about it too.

Maybe he is not the finest football player, but he is definitely an explosive fighter.